What Became of Mr. Desmond

This chapter explores Boyle’s most well-known novel and details its interaction with Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). It details Boyle’s re-imagining of Austen’s novel and her somewhat prescient reading of the text to detail genuine peril for its heroine within an otherwise broadly genteel form. It argues that, like Austen before her, Boyle writes within a recognisably and self-aware neo-gothic, melodramatic form. The plot and characters of Boyle’s novel directly echo Austen’s in several ways, not only in terms of superficial plot/character elements, but also (like Austen) Boyle subverts what may seem, initially and superficially, to represent the gentle mocking of girls who lose their ‘sense’ to outlandish fiction. Boyle’s (textually implicit) reading of Austen also predicts newer critical thinking about Northanger Abbey itself, which argues that the book is a more complex novel than it may first appear. As such, Boyle’s text speaks to a deeply nuanced understanding of Austen’s relationship with the gothic fiction that she satirises, one that sees her pre-empting the critical mood surrounding the novel by several decades.